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Reply to Doing Indigenous Epistemology: Internal Debates About Inside Knowledge in Māori Society’, by Toon Van Meilj

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-05-10, 09:59 authored by Jeffrey Sissons
Van Meijl is right to insist that epistemology must be about active, socially contested ‘ways of knowing’ and that understanding the relationship between such ways and their products is as much an ethnographic problem as it is a philosophical one. Ways of knowing, as social practices, are also, more generally, ways of being or becoming and so are not, in my view, radically distinct from the ontologies they produce and reproduce. Phillipe Descola argues strongly that his four ‘ontologies’ are also schemas of practice, fundamental ways that people know, experience and inhabit the world. I think Van Meijl is mistaken, therefore, when he characterises the ontological turn in anthropology as being about different relations between mind and matter. For me, it is most significantly about the different ways that personhood or subjectivity can be understood and embodied.

History

Preferred citation

Sissons, J. (2019). Reply to Doing Indigenous Epistemology: Internal Debates About Inside Knowledge in Māori Society’, by Toon Van Meilj. Current Anthropology, 60(2), 169-170. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/702538

Journal title

Current Anthropology

Volume

60

Issue

2

Publication date

2019-01-01

Pagination

169-170

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Publication status

Published

Contribution type

Article

ISSN

0011-3204